I TOLD YOU SO!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right, organizations always protect orthodoxy

I TOLD YOU SO!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right
MATT KAPLAN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An energetic and impassioned work of popular science about scientists who have had to fight for their revolutionary ideas to be accepted—from Darwin to Pasteur to modern day Nobel Prize winners.

For two decades, Matt Kaplan has covered science for the Economist. He’s seen breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the behavior of the research community, and how support can be withheld for those who don’t conform or have the right connections. In this passionately argued and entertaining book, Kaplan narrates the history of the 19th century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who realized that Childbed fever—a devastating infection that only struck women who had recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands. Semmelweis was met with overwhelming hostility by those offended at the notion that doctors were at fault, and is a prime example of how the scientific community often fights new ideas, even when the facts are staring them in the face.

In entertaining prose, Kaplan reveals scientific cases past and present to make his case. Some are familiar, like Galileo being threatened with torture and Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó being fired when on the brink of discovering how to wield mRNA–a finding that proved pivotal for the creation of the Covid-19 vaccine. Others less so, like researchers silenced for raising safety concerns about new drugs, and biologists ridiculed for revealing major flaws in the way rodent research is conducted. Kaplan shows how the scientific community can work faster and better by making reasonably small changes to the forces that shape it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm not often surprised by the organization of non-fiction, at least not in a positive way. In the case of this book, I expected it to be split into chapters, perhaps chronologically presented, by the scientist under discussion. Instead I got a very effective, more fluidly narrative, organization by...umm...style of heresy, shall we say.

Because that's really what this book traces. Heresy, thank you Wikipedia, is "any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, particularly the accepted beliefs or religious law of a religious organization." Any organized field of study with a governing body, a code of ethics, and professional credentialing requirements from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) to the American Medical Association (AMA) has orthodoxies, has institutional biases, has entrenched powers in the field that do not welcome viewpoints or research findings or demonstrations that question or...horripilation!...disprove their beliefs. It's human nature.

Yet there will always be the mavericks who try to do exactly that. The professional trouble they face is in direct proportion to their success in the challenge. Often they're treated as whistleblowers. It is an ugly truth of human nature that the powerful protect themselves before all other considerations, and science is a human endeavor that attracts lots of money so it behaves this way in spades.

It's more notable in the sciences because they each and all depend for their existence, let alone progress, on the people who live out the Asimov-attributed quote: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” (though the attribution seems to be spurious)".

I myownself am most personally impacted by the work done by maverick genius Katalin Karikó (featured in this book), whose mRNA discoveries led to the creation of COVID vaccines of enormous effectiveness. I live among smokers, old people, and the enfeebled. I got COVID several times, and unlike over fifty of the people in my facility who died, was never even hospitalized. I was miserably sick once, mildly ill once, and would never have known it was more than a mild cold twice had I not taken a home test which would never have existed before her work made it conceivable). You better believe I get my flu and COVID vaccines annually, and they would not have existed had a heretical voice in medical research not refused to be silenced.

Read this fascinating work celebrating the contrarians, the heretics, the whistleblowers who disrupt the cozy, never-change, "shut up and calculate" hierarchies inherent in institutional science. (And all other fields, of course.) Read it because you benefit from their work; read it because they're interesting people; read it because your culture would not *exist* without them.

But read it mostly because it's really very good. It's a job of writing that, on its own merits, I'd give four and a half stars to; the extra half-star is my acknowledgement of how very, very urgently we need mavericks and contrarians when we are facing multiple existential challenges and crises that science has both created and is uniquely able to solve...only not with the orthodox thinking that got us here.

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